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Games

Greg 'Ghostcrawler' Street, Lead Systems Designer For World of Warcraft 175

As World of Warcraft prepares for the launch of its third expansion, Cataclysm, on December 7th, the design team is busily trying to finish all the new high level content, the destruction and rebuilding of Azeroth, and major changes to many of the game's systems and classes. At Blizzcon we spoke with Greg Street (a.k.a. Ghostcrawler), Lead Systems Designer for WoW, about Blizzard's goals for this expansion, the problems they're trying to solve, reasoning for the creation of a few new features, and why they aren't willing to simply throw more people at complicated projects. Read on for our discussion about World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.
Government

Major Battle Brewing Between French Gov't and ISPs 111

Dangerous_Minds writes "Drew Wilson has been following HADOPI (France's three strikes law) a lot lately, and the latest developments are that the French ISPs and the French government are edging closer to a full-on war over compensation. The French government apparently requested that ISPs send an invoice of the bills after a certain period of time, but the French ISPs don't feel this is good enough — probably because of worries that the compensation the government will ultimately provide won't be enough. The ISPs are demanding adequate compensation, and if the government doesn't give it to them, they simply will not hand over evidence required to enforce HADOPI law. While HADOPI demands that ISPs cooperate, speculation suggests that if the government takes ISPs to court, the ISPs will simply rely on constitutional jurisprudence to shield them from liability (translation)."

Comment Origin of the file (kinda) (Score 5, Informative) 201

By the way, the file was released by the french association "La quadrature du Net", which is quite active as a defender of Net freedom and neutrality in France (they fought against HADOPI and the LOOPSI-pedo-filtering-and-blocking laws).

I don't know if they got the file themselves or if they just released it.

Comment Re:Not really affecting the code... (Score 1, Insightful) 207

Yes, I thought Linden Labs had the right to edict rules about how to connect to their servers and which data are sent.

The GPL frees the code, you are still free to hack and release it — but if you want to connect to Linden servers *and* mess around with their policy, they might not allow you to use this client.

Sounds like the Doom Engine : the code is free, but don't redistribute the copyrighted WAD. It didn't prevent the code of the engine to be hacked and used, right ?

Comment Because of the elections (Score 5, Informative) 108

The "urgent" status is actually because this censorship bill is part of a larger law, named LOPPSI 2, that addresses several "security" matters : more jail for everyone, Internet filtering, trojans for cops in "organized crime" investigation, and so on.

There are regional elections in France in about one month. The government tries to scare people on security matters — the good old "I want *everyone* to *remember* _why_they_need_us_ !". They want to pass the law before the elections, and gave it an "urgent" status that of course isn't justified in any other way.

Comment Re:The old Motto: (Score 3, Interesting) 271

There is no connection, of course. In France we *love* to tax unrelated business one for each other. Last year, to compensate the lifting of advertising on public TV channels, the french government decided to tax the telcos and the ISPs. Why ? Because they're making money, so why not ? The tax has not to make any sense, it has to tax successful businesses that make money. Oh, plus Google is evil and want to scan our beautiful books — you see, another reason !

Comment Re:What separate program is required for AJAX? (Score 2, Informative) 647

I think there's a good argument that a javascript engine isn't "separate" from the browser these days. It's so tightly integrated that the end user certainly can't pry it apart.

That's true for a lot of Web rendering engines, but not for all of them. The WebKit HTML renderer is decoupled from the Javascript engine, and can use JSCore (Safari) or V8 (Chrome) as a JS backend. And Firefox tries to keep SpiderMonkey separated from the rest of Gecko.

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